When the couple's ages, status, jobs and addresses were verified, a marriage certificate was issued. Other clauses in the marriage law explain that cousins cannot marry, nor can lepers. Mr. Hu had expected that his work unit would give him a place to live—a room in Yantai. He put in several requests, but was bypassed.
Mu told him to forget it. If they waited for a place to live they might never get married. She urged him to consider going through with the marriage. Could they live with his parents?
Mr. Hu said okay—let's do it. But there was another problem. January was deemed an unlucky month, according to an old tradition, for the way it falls just before Spring Festival. Both sets of parents implored the couple not to get married in an inauspicious month.
I said, "Did you agree that the month is unlucky?"
"Not really," Mr. Hu said, but he seemed uncertain. "But for their sakes, we changed the date."
"Are you superstitious?"
His face became very thin with the chattering laugh that meant You have just asked me a tactless question, but I will nevertheless answer it. He said, "I don't think so."
"Do you believe in God?" I asked.
"Sometimes," he said. He did not laugh.
By pretending to satisfy the old folks he could calm himself. He chose to get married just after Christmas. Chinese who study English rend to make a thing of Christmas—the eating, drinking, card-sending and gift-giving part: all its heathen elements.
Mr. Hu bought basins of food and cartons of wine and beer. His school friend Hua did the cooking. On the big day he rented a taxi—something he had never before done on his own—and he was driven to Mu's house. He wore a Western suit and necktie. He picked up Mu and proceeded to his parents' house, and on his arrival there strings of firecrackers were unleashed. That was eleven in the morning. The guests arrived at noon, and everyone ate and drank until ten that night.
At that point Mr. Hu and Mu went upstairs. They did not go to work for two days, nor did they stir out of the house. Their romantic tryst was sporadic, and this was not exactly a love nest, because seven people lived in the three-room apartment, and the TV set was in the room occupied by Mr. Hu and Mu. Occasionally members of the household wanted to watch their favorite programs.
Article 9 of the Marriage Law states, "Husband and wife enjoy equal status in the home." This was a bit tricky in the house owned by Mr. Hu's parents, because his mother did all the cooking—Mu could not cook—and "home" was really just a euphemism for the TV room with its convertible bed.
A unique feature of the Chinese Marriage Law is its unambiguous treatment of birth control. That is Article 12: "Husband and wife are in duty bound to practice family planning."
I did not ask Mr. Hu how they managed this aspect, though I was deeply curious. I simply asked him how he was enjoying marriage.
"So far, very nice," he said.
He said it did not bother him that his wife kept her own name. The law allowed children in China to adopt the name of either parent. The law insists that parents be kind and that they act responsibly. This is spelled out in specific detaiclass="underline" "Infanticide by drowning and any other acts causing serious harm to infants are prohibited."
If Mr. Hu's marriage did not work out, and Mu was of the same mind, a divorce could be very speedy. There were restrictions, of which the most interesting was Article 27: "The husband is not allowed to apply for a divorce when his wife is pregnant or within one year after the birth of a child." However, Mu could apply and could be granted a divorce, even though she happened to be pregnant. That seemed an enlightened and considerate way of looking at divorce. In general, the Marriage Law was as straightforward as a driver's manual.
The snow did not let up. The sleet accumulated in Yantai. It was a grim place, with the wind blowing from Siberia.
One snowy day a large group of pilgrims appeared in the hotel, wearing the smile that one instantly associates with people in possession of the Christian message. These were Americans, from Texas. They had come in search of a missionary who had been in this part of Shandong a hundred years ago. Her name was Lottie Moon. The group had discovered the ruins of Miss Moon's house about forty miles away at the coastal hamlet of Penglai. I was told that they regarded this woman as a saint and that they had volunteered to reconstruct the house and the church using their own money, and the Chinese government was on the point of agreeing to this. In Mao's China that would have been unthinkable.
Only six years before, I had copied down an inscription under the photograph of a Catholic church in Nanjing. Its tone was very fierce. It read in part, American imperialism took preaching as its cover. All over China they erected churches like this and carried out destructive activities.... The American missionaries joined up with the Qing Dynasty troops and attacked the Small Sword Society troops, and the church acted as a stronghold.
I asked Mr. Hu what he thought of this difference in official attitudes.
"If people know about Lottie Moon and other missionaries in Yantai, they will visit here and enjoy themselves."
By "people" he meant foreign tourists. His attitude was characteristic of the Chinese in generaclass="underline" if it brought in tourists and was not immoral, it was to be encouraged, whether it was missionaries, rebuilt churches, or city tours of the bourgeois suburbs of old Shandong. But there were obvious dangers in tourism. After the complete eradication of venereal disease (the fifty-year personal struggle of an idealistic doctor from Buffalo, New York, George Hatem, who became Chinese, transmogrifying himself into Ma Haiteh), the VD clinics were reopened in 1987, to cope with new outbreaks of the disease. But antibiotics were not to be the only remedy. The Chinese also recently decreed that the punishment for engaging in prostitution would be a bullet in the neck.
18: The Slow Train to Qingdao: Number 508
On these one-day railway trips, the Chinese could practically overwhelm a train with their garbage. Nearly everyone on board was befouling the available space. While I sat and read I noticed that the people opposite, after only a few hours, had amassed on their table (I scribbled the details on my flyleaf): duck bones, fish bones, peanut shells, cookie wrappers, sunflower-seed husks, three teacups, two tumblers, a thermos, a wine bottle, two food tins, spittings, leavings, orange rinds, prawn shells and two used diapers.
The Chinese could be very tidy, but there was also something sluttishly comfortable about an accumulation of garbage, as though it were a symbol of prosperity. The coaches were smoky, and so crowded it was an effort to make my way down the aisle. The train was full of shrieks and stinks. The loudspeaker played a Chinese version of "Flower of Malaya" ("Rose, Rose, I love you, with an aching heart..."). Some big card games were in progress. Passengers read The Yantai Workers' Daily, and romantic novels (People's Liberation Army soldier and his gal back home in Wuhan), and a Chinese magazine I had not seen before, called World Screen, with a portrait of Roger Moore (as James Bond) on the cover.
It was not an old railway line. At a time when steam trains were being phased out in the United States, and rail lines closed, this line from Yantai to Qingdao was being built. It was 1950, and a few years later a brand-new old-fashioned steam engine went gasping down the track with red flags flying from its boiler. It should have happened sooner, but it was not in the interests of the Germans or the Japanese (who had occupied this province) to build the line. In any case, the vision and altruism that are espoused by colonialists are not readily apparent in China. Unlike in Africa and India, the imperialists in China set themselves up in competition against the Chinese, which was another reason Mao execrated them. They were not all racketeers, but they all thrived on China's disunity.